Isle of Wight foursome Coach Party are gearing up for a big year. Long on our list of buzzy new acts, they’re roaring out of ‘the last few years’ with the kind of fire that suggests they’re out to make up for lost time. We asked them to talk us through their brand new EP, ‘Nothing Is Real’. And so they did. And here it is.
FLAG (Feel Like A Girl)
When we wrote and recorded ‘FLAG’, not one of us thought of it as a single. It does a thing that we’ve never done before, so even when all the people close to us were saying, “that’s the single, right?” we were thinking, “no, of course not, what’s wrong with you?” But maybe in retrospect, that’s why it stands out and was a good single: it came as a surprise.
Shit TV
On most days, we’d all agree that ‘Shit TV’ is our favourite track on the EP. The guitar riff had been hanging around for ages, and we must have written about four songs around that riff before we figured out what direction we wanted to take it in. But once we did finally figure it out, it must have taken us about five minutes to write the lyrics and even longer to record it.
3 Kisses
For our first two EPs, we’d been rehearsing and even gigging most of the songs before we thought about recording them. But for this record, the only song that follows that suit is ‘3 Kisses’ (if you saw us on tour last year, you’d have heard it). Jess [Eastwood] brought these sinister but also pretty funny verses into the studio, and we just kept playing it for a couple of days while it gradually turned into a song. Not sure exactly how many times it says “I wanna be your girlfriend” from start to finish, but it’s gotta be enough to make a decent drinking game.
Weird Me Out
This song wasn’t part of the plan for this EP. We had all the songs decided on and were halfway through making the record, but whilst on tour in December, we wrote a few songs, including this one, and knew that it had to be on the EP. Turned out it also had to be a single ahead of the EP release, so we ended up with a mad sprint to refine & record that track, which with hindsight was a great thing for the feel of that recording. It has the same non-stop energy we needed to get it finished (more or less) to schedule.
Nothing Is Real
It’s more than four minutes long, which for us basically makes it our ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. We were really particular about how we put this song together – we’re totally aware of who we are as a band and that we kind of have a thing which makes us us, but sometimes a song like this one comes along that challenges those things and it can be really rewarding to see it through. We’re really proud that this one names and finishes off our third EP.